Fundamentalism Moves Mountains
Sometimes it’s useful to think like a fundamentalist. Not only does such thought free the mind of rational encumbrance and moral complexity, but it just may open the door to possibilities made unconscionable by the niggling precepts of justice and equality and environmental concern. The sweet little girl, who dons a Halloween mask of a tusked wild boar and then charges about the room snorting and pawing, striking fear into adults and children alike, is an apt metaphor. The mask enables, you might say frees, the girl to be fearsomely one-dimensional. Others, unmasked, retreat, accepting that such transformation is possible, as though the mask unleashed a power far greater than the child was known to possess. Fundamentalism is like that.
But I’m not suggesting that a wild boar is a fundamentalist. No, I would never impugn the nuanced lives of boars by diminishing them so. Rather, I wanted to put on the fundamentalist mask to help myself understand my recent experience and then extend it while masked.
I wrote an essay recently about my tour of mountaintop removal sites in West Virginia. Even when you see it, it’s painfully hard to comprehend — not because one’s eyes cannot embrace the devastated landscape, nor even because three hundred million years of Nature’s work was so easily desecrated by King Coal, but, hard because one’s heart cannot accept the mentality that relished the destruction. I mean, why would a people want to bomb themselves back into the Stone Age? They wouldn’t, of course. And they didn’t.
Powerful outsiders in thrall of an alien god did. Their fundamentalist god ordained it. The fundamentalism at work here is not different in its mania from that of a serial killer. In fact, when the murderous tally has rendered, thus far, 450 of the world’s oldest and most beautiful mountains into two million acres of rubble, the comparison seems more than apt.
This monotheism’s fundamentalism is absurdly simple. Its name is Profit. All of its liturgies and canons, commandments and creeds, rituals and prayers are chanted repetitions of its own name. There shall be no other god before Profit. Neither respect for nature nor the lives of people shall inhibit the divine right of it to proclaim its name. Profit! Such proclamation shall echo from hill to hill…………….oh, but the hills are gone. No matter. Profit owns the airwaves.
So, I put on the mask of the god Profit. ( Part of the creed is that the word “god” is in lowercase, Profit in upper.) What do I see clairvoyantly through the thin slits of the eye holes? I see extreme waste, and I see a public relations bonanza. I see how billions of tons of mountains have been bulldozed into valleys, burying thousands of streams. What a missed opportunity! In the future I see a never ending convoy of coal trucks hauling all that blasted rubble to the East coast. I see the construction of a new, resurrected (!) mountain range, from Miami to Maine, the Appalachian Coastal Range! The top of the range will mimic mountainous undulations and also be a broad highway. Incredible water views. A toll road! Every twenty mile stretch named for a corporation that underwrote the trucking. Every fifty miles an Exxon and McDonald’s. We’ll call the whole thing the Appalachian Trail. (Not very original, but the former trail is gone.) No more tedious hiking! We’ll pave it with all that coal slurry we have needlessly damned up back in West Virginia. Through the mask I see that we will need to take down all the mountains, even the ones without coal buried in them, to finish the greatest public works project since the Great Wall in China. (Memo: Relocation of mountains not-containing coal will be paid for by the taxpayers. Memo: As a public works project, all the expenses should be paid for but public funds!) We will build hundreds of new coal burning plants, which will, no doubt, accelerate climate change. But, our new Appalachian Coastal Range will protect the East Coast. The swelling Atlantic, thrashing and churning with steroidal storms, will be laughed at by mountaintop trekkers in their SUVs. People will be so grateful! Folks on the West coast will demand that Colorado and Wyoming be similarly re-positioned.
The benefits go on and on. Disney will make what’s left of southern West Virginia into a high plains theme park for hunter gatherers. (Isn’t that a nicer term than “hillbilly”?) African antelope and wildebeest will be imported to replace the extinct native bear and deer.
Damn, what is not possible when you put on the fundamentalist mask?!!
Sooner or later, though, you have to take it off. It’s hard to breath in that confined space. Then you might listen to a new CD, The Fable True, by Maine’s great singer/songwriter Dave Mallett. He’s set quotations from Henry David Thoreau’s 1846 book The Maine Woods, a journal of Thoreau’s travel across northern Maine by foot and bateau and his climbing of Mt. Katahdin, to music. One of the quotations is this:
Strange that so few ever come to the woods to see how the pine lives and grows and spires, lifting its evergreen arms to the light, - to see its perfect success; but most are content to behold it in the shape of many broad boards brought to market, and deem that its true success! But the pine is no more lumber than man is, and to be made into boards and houses is no more its true and highest use than the truest use of a man is to be cut down and made into manure. There is a higher law affecting our relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man. Can he who has discovered only some of the values of whalebone and whale oil be said to have discovered the true use of the whale? Can he who slays the elephant for his ivory be said to have “seen the elephant”? These are petty and accidental uses; just as if a stronger race were to kill us in order to make buttons and flageolets of our bones; for everything may serve a lower as well as a higher use. Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine-trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.
Is it the lumberman, then, who is the friend and lover of the pine, stands nearest to it, and understands its nature best? Is it the tanner who has barked it, or he who has boxed it for turpentine, whom posterity will fable to have been changed into a pine at last? No! no! it is the poet; he it is who makes the truest use of the pine, - who does not fondle it with an axe, nor tickle it with a saw, nor stroke it with a plane, - who knows whether its heart is false without cutting into it, - who has not bought the stumpage of the township on which it stands. All the pines shudder and heave a sigh when that man steps on the forest floor. No, it is the poet, who loves them as his own shadow in the air, and lets them stand. I have been into the lumber-yard, and the carpenter’s shop, and the tannery, and the lampblack-factory, and the turpentine clearing; but when at length I saw the tops of the pines waving and reflecting the light at a distance high over all the rest of the forest, I realized that the former were not the highest use of the pine. It is not their bones or hide or tallow that I love most. It is the living spirit of the tree, not its spirit of turpentine, with which I sympathize, and which heals my cuts. It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.
I listened to Thoreau’s wisdom, spoken by Dave Mallett over his gentle and respectful music, and I wondered about the “perfect success” of the mountains.
–Robert Shetterly
www.americanswhotellthetruth.org
John Hay - A Beginner’s Faith in Things Unseen
“My world has greatly changed in concept and perception, and I enjoy the view from a mountaintop more than I was able to do as a child. Exaltation takes practice.”
I was part of a Corps of Engineers team investigating the hydrology of these large mountaintop removal sites and found that once they are seen, even after so-called “reclamation”, one cannot have a neutral opinion about them. When I heard the mine operators defending the practice, one could see in their eyes that they didn’t for a minute believe their lies.
At current coal prices, banning all eastern US surface mining would still allow plenty of coal to be mined for profit (assuming one believes coal should be mined at all) - the profit would be bit less is all, and conventional underground mining creates more, better paying jobs anyway.
It is only the capitalist’s fanatic belief in maximum profit over the life itself that apparently allows these poeple to sleep at night.
I even heard the argument from one of them that their mining is creating open, western-US style vistas where there were only boring hardwood and hemlock trees.
As the accompanying picture shows, these eco-hippies now have southwestern-style scenery right in their area - what are they complaining about?
In an eon to come, a more sentient people discover the remnants of homo sapiens’ culture and and wonder what happened to them. After careful study, their archeologists determine:
They disappeared as a result of two persistent habits.
1. They put assholes in charge.
2. They crapped where they ate.
Can anyone make a better argument for government regulation?
By law, the corporation must maximize profits.
Regulatory law is the only thing that protects the environment, social security, medicare, education, etc.
Strange how big business always manages to convince small business that they will benefit from deregulation.
capitalism is a religion- certainly not a science. they believe it works all evidence to the contrary. and for the captains (or high priests) of industry it indeed does work. the rest of us don’t believe hard enough.
geoff29—” Exaltation takes practice.” I truly love that quote and feel in my own heart how very true that is.
I am profoundly grateful that my life’s choices and the circumstances beyond my conscious control, have offered me lots of practice time. Thank you for your beautiful contribution! How often what you have to say speaks directly to my heart.
Whilst it is true that Cream Rises….anyone who has ever cleaned out a septic tank knows that cream is not all that rises.
Sociopaths are highly equiped with the tools needed to rise to the top, in business, government or religion. And they have done so quite well.
Religion is the great enabler. After all, man has dominion over, well, pretty much everything. According to the old testament god man can use, well, pretty much everything as he sees fit. And since we are all heading inexorably toward the rapture, the rape of the planet only speeds along the long-awaited ascension of the pious.
Accompany that with the belief that all that is needed to pass into heaven is a deathbed confessional, and all bad behavior can be wiped clean, so no need to follow any other clumsy laws, rules, or mores.
And it seems all of the actual teachings of Christ can safely be ignored, in favor of those of the old testament god, which are much easier to follow. Of course, they lead to many problems, what with their “eye for an eye” system — just ask the jews who can’t seem to get along with any of their neighbors and have suicide bombers at their gates constantly.
There must be some way to paint old testament fundamentalists as just that, and not to call them Christians. After all, whatever happened to Mathew 19:24 “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to pass into the gates of heaven.” Of course, the old god is to be taken literally, while Jesus spoke only in proverbs that are meant as metaphors.
What callow sophistication.
The Crandall Canyon mine disaster in Utah of last summer, by a company run by one Robert E. Murray, showed America what the profit motive can do to a man.
It is this type of personality, the cult of Profit worshippers, who have sold their decency and soul to the almighty dollar, it is they, who are in charge now / of govt, the media, entertainment, corporations, by and large.
This is the secret coup that has taken place in this country during the last 13 years, since the GOP (greed over people) took congress with their “contract with America” bullshit - bait and switch scam.
That the people of West Virginia are allowing this to happen to their mountains, is a warning to all of us, of the dangers these people pose, and their plans for planet Earth. The West Virginian’s are pretty much dependent on King Coal for their livelyhoods. So what’s good for coal, is good for W. Virginia.
Following that dependency model, we have a nation of sheeple dependent on big Oil, who will just as soon say, “what’s good for Big Oil, is good for America.”
Is it any wonder we are in Iraq, soon to be Iran, with the vast majority of people ambivelent about it, just going about their self absorbed lives? With a Duh, what? awareness of what is happening?
skeptimist posted - November 14th, 2007 1:44 pm
“In an eon to come, a more sentient people discover the remnants of homo sapiens’ culture and and wonder what happened to them. After careful study, their archeologists determine:
They disappeared as a result of two persistent habits.
1. They put assholes in charge.
2. They crapped where they ate.”
Perfect ::::::
It is the responsibility of the individual to inform one’s self that the mountaintops are being removed, look at the sky and see the brown haze that wasn’t there ten years ago, and shift one’s exchange/association away from the power centers and toward one’s local community.
Every individual has to become a lifelong trust-buster. Always ask yourself - where is the power concentrating now? And act accordingly with individual boycott. Of course, it’s common sense. It’s a type of socialism.
Moving Mountains
I see that DARPA is busy making gas guzzlers that can run without human intervention. Now we can continue to ruin our planet and polute our environment long after we have killed off the last human being. How the Gods must be laughing!
starofthesea,
I am learning from Commondreams just how many people out there I really like too and I zoom right in on your posts! They give me hope!
By the way, Commondreams, John Hay, one of the premiere American Naturalists, lives right down the street from your office there, sort of, I guess. Close enough since it’s Maine! Or maybe you can’t get there from there or whatever they say up in your neck nowadays.
I enjoyed this Robert Shetterly article, and I’ve been tuned in on Bill McKibben for quite a while too, he’s cool, and knows how to x country ski.
But can’t you refer to Mr. Hay every once in a while???! I’m biased I’ll admit.
Think like a fundamentalist? Isn’t that an oxymoron?
Why are people so obsessed with this planet? Don’t you know that 28 multi-planet solar systems have been discovered within 30 light years of our solar system? God’s plan is for Homo Saps to strip this insignificant planet and move on to other pristine solar systems. Reserve space on the starship for coal companies please.
AlexLawyer, et al. For another scary look at what fundie Christians are doing read ret. US Air Force Col. David Antoon’s CD article “The Cancer from Within” written after paying a visit to the Air Force Academy with his son who aspired to going to the Academy.
There is a board game similar to “Monopoly” called pollution that lets players experience this impact of the degradation of the environment. The major difference is that as people obtain money there is an increase in the pollution level of the community. IE land on the steel company and you pay the steel company $400 and at the same time the pollution index goes up. At a certain level the game is over because the pollution kills everybody. There are means available in the game to reduce pollution levels, but these require collective action. I’ve noticed over the years having used this a teaching aid, that a group of young men will when they have died (gamewize) will make comments about who died the richest. A group of young women in the same class on the other hand will have shut down the steel company and modified the economy in creative ways to sustain life and keep the pollution index low. When the young men and woment are both in t he same game, there is a lot of dynamics about what and how things should be changed. Pollution is the name of the game and it was published by Houghtlin Mifflin (sp?)and may still be available from scientific supply companies such as Carolina Biology Supplies.
My comment on further plant for exploitation was satirizing the assumptions behind the reckless raping of Earth. The heedless plundering implies that corporate capitalism can move on to other planets after exhausting this on.